She nodded again.
“What the hell’d you do to him?”
A long, exasperated sigh escaped from a pair of plump, kissable lips. For the first time, she turned to face us.
“You really wanna know?”
All three of us looked at each other. We nodded like lemmings.
“Fine. I did the worst possible thing a girl could do to a guy, apparently.”
My eyes narrowed, as my mind swam with possibilities.
“Kicked him in the balls?” I offered.
“No, worse,” the devil breathed, as Carter released the bottle. Slowly, she poured another full round of drinks.
“I took his virginity.”
~ 4 ~
HAYDEN
It was supposed to be a fun night; dressing up, going out, getting buzzed on cheap beer and drunk on a few laughs. It ended how I should’ve known it would, whenever we were in public. Cole’s rampant jealousy hadn’t gotten any better in the ten years we’d been apart. If anything, it’d gotten twenty times worse.
And now here I was, stranded in some bar at the ass end of town, dressed like the devil who’d been to hell and back. I had runs in my stockings, and some kind of dressing in my hair. My hand still hurt from punching the guy who’d brought me here, as my mind screamed a thousand ‘I told you so’s.’
“So you took his virginity…” the hunk to my right repeated numbly. “Like you mean, tonight?”
I laughed into my shot glass, this time sipping it instead of throwing it back.
“No, silly. Ten years ago. Back in high school.”
He ran a hand through his sandy blond hair and huffed. It was the kind of hair that was lusciously thick, but always messy. Like he just landed a skydive, or took off a motorcycle helmet.
“You monster,” the man quipped.
“No, no, you know what I mean,” I countered. “You always remember your first, right? Only, I shouldn’t have doneit because I didn’t want to be remembered. Especially by him, although I didn’t realize it at the time.”
“And he’sstillnot over you?” He shook his head. “After all that time?”
“We used to date a million years ago,” I sighed, thinking all the way back. “Back then, Cole was nerdy cute. Computer club, chess team, that sort of thing. This is all before the bodybuilding and MMA stuff, of course. We met in the library, actually, at some after school gaming contest. He was shy and awkward, everything I wasn’t. I brought him out of his shell.”
“Couldn’t you have left himinhis shell?” the guy pouring the shots quipped.
I looked him over, and not for the first time. My hero bartender was pleasantly tall, with dark brown hair that looked tousled without being messy. He had deliciously broad shoulders. A square jaw, covered in sexy stubble. The latter I suspected he sported not because it was attractive, but because he was just too busy to keep it shaved.
Yeah, he was definitely everything I seemed to love in a man. But it was his warm brown eyes that really took hold of me. I saw hope and rescue in those eyes, almost immediately upon bursting into his bar. And I’d been right.
“Anyway, things were good for a month or two,” I went on. “After that, Cole became infatuated with me. As I said, I was his first. He fell head over heels for me, to the point where I couldn’t even breathe without him being in my personal space. He got jealous. Controlling. And then… well…”
“You saw what a psychotic asshole he was, and broke up with him?”
The third guy was taller than the others; almost as tall as Cole, himself. His close-cropped hair and smooth, clean-shaven face made him seem all business.
“I did,” I eventually admitted. “And it was a nightmare. It took a while, but he eventually backed off. By then he had some confidence, and started pursuing other girls.”
“Lucky them,” the blond coughed.
